Friday, 13 July 2007

Got up about 8.30am. Had a shower, ate breakfast etc. Went on my comp, just went on the pinternet and did some work work. Went down the village so jon could get out £40 he owes me from the money I gave him to pay for his driving lesson the other day and also to buy some birdseed from the petshop.

Grandad & Uncle Mike came at about 12.20pm, then we waited till mum got back from nursery and had lunch just after 1pm.

After lunch I listened to grandad talking about when he was in Italy in the war and also tried to sort out the problem that I can't login to my work PC. Around 4pm Grandad and Uncle Mike left and also TSG sorted out the problem with my PC at work so I could log in to it. After that I started work on getting the E-Update ready to send out - Suzanne had emailed me a copy of the text content.

At 5pm we had dinner. At 5.30pm I started working working again, unfortunately I didn't have much success sending tests of the email through the database - It kept just opening the email with an Email address in the BCC box. At 6.30pm I watched Natures Calendar. At 7.00pm I started working again. After trying different things I eventually gave up on sending the email through the database and decided to just export a list of email addresses from the database to excel and then bulk email through Word mail merge.

I did this, first using a test list with only my email address. The email didn't come out properly, so I had to make a few changes and do a few more tests before it was ready to send. After that I sent it out, but I kept having to click cancel on an error message that pops up every time someone doesn't have a sensible email address (e.g. no @ sign or has a comma instead of a dot), which was very annoying. Due to the slow upspeed internet connection at work (and maybe my slow upspeed here) it takes about 30 seconds after you click on the message until it registers the click and dissapears.

Eventually all the emails to the members got sent, and then I just had to do the ones to chairs of associations. Unfortunately the list of chairs of affiliated assocs didn't have the email addresses for the chairs in it, and one assoc was missing as well. So I had to manually go through the database to find their record and their email address. When I'd made a list I phoned Suzanne to tell her the members email had gone (she asked me to phone her and let her know when it had gone) and also to ask what I should do about some assoc chairs that did nae have emails. So I gave her a call, but her phone went on to answerphone (it was 10.20pm) so I just left a message for her. She hasn't called back yet, hopefully she won't call back after 11pm cos I'm going to go to bed in a second.

After that I just sent the email to the chairs that do have emails and cleared up some files and stuff. Again, the process is very slow due to the large lag.